Star Wars’ Stumble Points to Free, Open Future for Online Worlds

Electronic Arts made its MMO game Star Wars: The Old Republic free to play last week, but that might not be enough to revive it. Image: Electronic Arts

The $15-a-month subscription game is dying. But it’s not because players are cheap, it’s because they’re bored.

As the game development website Gamasutra put it, the most expensive game in history is now free: With a reported $200 million budget, the massively multiplayer RPG Star Wars: The Old Republic wasn’t attracting nearly the number of subscribers that publisher Electronic Arts needed if it was going to see returns. So EA added a business model that has been lucrative for other online games: Allow gamers to play for free, then charge them small amounts for upgrades once they’re hooked.

But that may not be enough. Experts in the space say the reason Star Wars struggles while other online games are killing it isn’t because of the money, it’s because of how the games themselves are designed. It’s not the business model that’s obsolete, but the product.

“If you look at the game releases of the last three years — look at Star Wars: The Old Republic, look at Rift, look at The Secret World, every one of them does this,” he said, moving his hand up then quickly downwards to show the games’ player bases quickly declining. “Every one.”

Mark Kern, the original lead developer of the breakthrough MMO World of Warcraft and now the head of Red 5 Studios, explained the problem in an interview with Wired earlier this year.

“The biggest problem is the fact that you’ve got a monthly model, but it’s so expensive to make content for the traditional MMO now that if you spend $250 million like EA did on Star Wars, you’ve only got 30 days’ worth of content,” he said. Old Republic’s big draw was an elaborate, multi-part storyline set in George Lucas’ galaxy far, far away. But once Old Republic players burned through all of that content, there was nothing to keep them involved. The cost and time required to develop more content for players to enjoy made it difficult to impossible to keep them supplied with entertainment for their $15 a month.

“So you’ve made 15 bucks from the consumers, basically, before they churn out of your game,” Kern said.

World of Warcraft, said Kern, didn’t have this problem because in 2004, game production costs (and players’ expectations) were so much lower that it was economically feasible to churn out content and keep players engaged every month, so they didn’t cancel their subscriptions.

With today’s high cost of game production, Kern said, “that model is dead.”

In a Warcraft-style MMO, players can explore cities and faraway lands, but almost nothing can happen that was not intended to happen by the developer. Players can feel this difference. They know when they’re being escorted through the world on a leash. They might tolerate the leash for a while so long as the experience stays fresh, but once it’s not, they have no reason to continue subscribing.

“You end up in a race to keep enough content out there before the bulk of your players become bored,” said Jon Lander, executive producer of the space exploration MMO EVE Online, in an e-mail. “With [EVE], the more people who come into the game, the less chance you have of getting bored. That overall idea is what has kept us steadily growing now for 10 years.”

EVE Online relies heavily on the interactions that organically take place between characters, rather than developer-created content, to keep its users hooked. Lander said that when EVE started out in 2003 there wasn’t even much of a game yet, but there were systems in place to allow players to interact. As people started to form bonds, the game became better and better. Today it has nearly half a million highly dedicated subscribers, but it took a substantial risk for the developer to release a game that depended on players to drive the experience.

Other online sandbox games that have been quite successful at attracting players are Minecraft and DayZ.

What these games share is a certain openness in their gameplay; neither tells players how they must spend their time. In DayZ, a free modification for a military shooter game called ARMA 2, players scavenge for supplies and attempt to survive as long as possible in a hostile apocalypse populated by zombies and up to 150 other players — who might be even more dangerous than the undead.

Minecraft is just as simple. The only goal is to survive, dig up materials and build stuff. This simplicity ensures that the focus of the game is on the player’s creativity and imagination — what magnificent thing will you build, and will you survive long enough to do it?

John Smedley says that Sony’s upcoming MMO Everquest Next will be more Minecraft than Warcraft.

It is “emergent gameplay” — allowing players true freedom and encouraging them to build their own experiences — that will define the next generation of successful MMO games, he said.

“We need to add emergent gameplay to our games if they’re going to last,” he told the company’s biggest fans at the October festival. “So we are. SOE has committed itself to a focus on emergent and sandbox-style play.”

Games that allow players the opportunity to drive their own destiny spread more quickly via social networking and word-of-mouth, as gamers excitedly relate tales of their unique adventures to their friends.

In the end, the phenomenon is something any parent already understands: Give a kid an expensive toy and they’ll grow bored within hours, but give them an empty cardboard box and their imagination will run wild for days.